


The finest wych-elm in Herfordshire

by lbmisscharlie



Category: Howards End - E. M. Forster
Genre: F/F, F/M, Interstitial, Reminiscing, personified houses
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-12
Updated: 2018-05-12
Packaged: 2019-05-05 15:50:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,077
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14621967
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lbmisscharlie/pseuds/lbmisscharlie
Summary: She can only see the house through Ruth’s eyes, through the ghostly haunt of her voice; but then, isn’t that only right?





	The finest wych-elm in Herfordshire

**Author's Note:**

> To me, a Man-Hating Homosexual, Margaret's interest in Henry has always been perplexing. Then, watching the new miniseries version and seeing the intense chemistry Hayley Atwell has with everyone, really, but particularly in the few scenes of Margaret's friendship with Ruth, suggested a new way of reading Margaret's choices.

It seems very odd that she should see the house like this, without Ruth, in the end. Strange to breathe the unsettled air, dust kicked up and dim in the wet daylight and a scent of old roses lurking somewhere at the edge of the damp. Queer to rest her hand here, on the rubbed-old gloss of the mantle, and feel as though her hand is enveloped, cupped and held by a hand that is no longer. 

Margaret pulls her hand away, drops it to her side. Her fingertips feel warm, unaccountably. Helen would have a word for it, would call it something grazing across her from the spirit realm; if all that exists, though, Margaret would not hope, not for a moment, for her dear Ruth to be there, just across a stretched-thin veil of time, unsettled and lonely. 

She was lonely when they first met: they both were. Ruth in her chambers in the upper corner room, while the bustle of the house went to and fro beneath her, and Margaret at Wickham Place, with Helen and Tibby and enough company to keep for the rest of one’s days. Only across the way, and not alone, but yet. 

The room is mostly empty, one bedraggled cushion on the window seat and a side table forgotten by the door, and a chill lingers in the air. It is a room that needs a fire, Margaret thinks, the very type of room that one can hardly imagine without the crackle of flame and the suffusion of warmth. Without it, the room is not itself. 

In the next room, the window jambs are decorated with carved rosebuds in medallions, barely the size of Margaret’s palm. Ruth told her of these, of running her fingertips up them as a child and thinking of rose-climbed trellises even in the depths of winter. She can only see the house through Ruth’s eyes, through the ghostly haunt of her voice; but then, isn’t that only right? 

In the hall again, the stairway invites her step. Its carpets have been taken away, likely for cleaning, and her shoes sound against wood a bit too bright, naked and unshielded in its uncarpeted state. They sound of heartbeats, she thinks, her footsteps. A steady tapping that mingles with the shuddering of rain outside until it seems to surround her. 

Halfway up, she hears the door. “Henry?” she calls out, but there’s nothing in return. It mustn’t have been the door after all, she thinks, but just the sounds of an old, empty house, and the thought strikes her heart as she stands there on the landing, one hand on the oiled-dark wood of the banister. 

It is empty and it isn’t, she thinks, for as she stands there she hears, again, sound, but not this time her footsteps or even the rain, but something elemental. A thudding, a thrumming, like the house’s own heart beats. A peculiar feeling wells up in her, the kind of thing a doctor might call a womanly faint in all the feebleness of their masculine imaginations. For she isn’t faint at all, only overcome, and those are not the same. 

Turning, she drops to sit on the step, one hand pressed to her stomach and the other at her mouth. It has been years now since Ruth was last here, at her beloved Howards End, and the air has changed. Margaret wishes it weren’t so, wishes that she could breathe in just that same air as her Ruth. That, as their lips will never touch again, she might take in something, even something so insubstantial, that once passed her beloved’s lips. 

They won’t stay here, she and Henry; he is fixed against it. He is not the sort of man who explains his mind, or, not the sort who explains the true motivations but rather gives reasons. She won’t push him. She would stay here, she thinks, quite happily, even with him. She cannot – will not – be Ruth, but she loves him for the way he loved her. Even in the drawing room at Ducie Street, in the moment when he gave her his question, she thought of Ruth, of Howards End, before she knew it, and if she hadn’t she mightn’t have said yes. 

The damp of her coat creeps inward, and Margaret feels a shiver pass through her. Helen would, too, have something to say about that, of ghosts and graves, were Helen not a bit cross with her. She pretends as though she’s not, but it is changed between them. How can Helen know, though: she only sees Henry, now. Doesn’t see the way Ruth lingers at his edges, the very last bit of her Margaret can grasp. She’s there, just in the creasing of his coat at the elbow and the way he tilts his head down, to the left, as though still catching her soft-spoken voice. 

Not always, of course: with the eyes of others on him, he stands erect and straight, hands held only to himself. But then, even, she sees him through Ruth’s eyes, as in that first afternoon they met in the cathedral at Speyer and Helen and Henry had rather argued over the architecture. Even then, well before Ruth had stolen into her heart, Margaret had found herself entranced by the way Ruth had looked at her husband. Bemused – tolerant – but altogether fond, even while Margaret herself blushed at the way Helen carried herself on, keen as ever to disagree. 

Standing up, Margaret begins to make her way down the stairs. She won’t venture above stairs today, not with the house so full of empty spaces. She’ll know which was Ruth’s bedroom as soon as she looks: the corner chamber, with a broad-gabled window from which she could see the wych-elm. The wych-elm, the finest in Herfordshire, with its boar’s teeth and magical attributes, anchors the whole house, the entire cherished plot of land, all that is and was Howards End: a tree, growing tenaciously, with its own life and sense all outside of human understanding.

When the sun comes out again, she’ll go to it, the tree, she thinks. No sense in wallowing out in the mud, in seeing the rain drip down in fat cold tears over the ancient bark. No, she thinks, no: she’ll see it with the sun of Ruth’s half-remembered childhood summers on her back, kissing the skin of her neck. It’s the only right way.


End file.
